My Case - as Claimant
1. The Claimant was employed by a leading sustainable land-management charity committed to improving environmental quality and advancing fair social and economic outcomes, serving as Estate and Facilities Officer for the new Marleigh community in Cambridge. When a major public-health incident occurred in January 2024, she raised concerns about what she perceived to be an inadequate level of support for residents, as approximately 1,000 people were left without safe water for a week. External stakeholders appeared focused on technical matters, with limited attention to the practical impact on vulnerable residents.
2. Around half of the affected residents were housed under local-authority licensing schemes, which the Claimant understood to indicate shared responsibilities for residents’ safety and welfare. Early media reports, including a strict “do not use” notice (BBC, 20 January) and confirmation of the closure of the primary school (Cambridge News, 19 January), reinforced her understanding of the seriousness of the incident.
3. The Claimant was regarded as an award-winning employee known for integrity, professionalism, and her commitment to building a safe and inclusive community. Upon learning of the incident, she recognised its seriousness and believed that the local authority had not attended the site despite what she understood to be relevant emergency-response obligations.
4. The Claimant was guided by a lifelong and sincerely held belief in social and environmental justice; for her, faith and duty are closely connected and expressed through responsibility toward others. Acting in accordance with her health-and-safety obligations, she sought to initiate a lessons-learned review.
5. The Claimant considered that her principles and her refusal to compromise on matters of safety and accuracy were met with hostility, which she believed amounted to unfavourable and potentially discriminatory treatment. Her response to the incident reflected her public-spirited concern and sense of duty, informed by historic UK water-contamination events such as Camelford and Bovingdon, which she understood to illustrate the risks of delayed communication and insufficient accountability.
6. Her actions were also consistent, in her view, with the personal moral duty demonstrated by individuals who raised environmental risks in the public interest, including Erin Brockovich and Susan McIntyre. She saw these figures as illustrative of the vigilance often shown by women and mothers rooted in their communities, and regarded her own actions as aligned with that approach.
7. The Claimant’s motivation was, she believed, solely to protect the community. She considered residents’ safety to have been, and to remain, at risk, and perceived a lack of transparency and support from key stakeholders. The Respondent’s client, comprising the landowner and the housebuilder who was the principal contractor responsible for the site where the contamination occurred, appeared, in her view, to downplay the incident and to influence stakeholders who lacked first-hand knowledge of events.
8. Her intention, she maintains, was not to cause harm but to raise legitimate concerns in good faith. She considered that her willingness to do so was followed by adverse treatment: she was removed from the site and subsequently summarily dismissed for three alleged counts of gross misconduct, which she disputes.
9. By the time of the incident, the Claimant understood that the Respondent had been under pressure from its client since September 2023 to remove her from the site, which she regarded as unwarranted. During this period, her senior manager attempted to shield her from what the Claimant experienced as hostile and unjustified criticism.
10. Both the Claimant and her senior manager were women; all other key parties were male. The Claimant believed this context may have influenced the dynamics she encountered and may have compounded misunderstandings related to her disabilities, ADHD and Asperger’s, for which she required understanding and appropriate support.
11. Before taking up the role, the Claimant informed her senior manager that she could not be expected to succeed if judged against the developer’s values, which she reasonably believed conflicted with her own and those of the charity. She believed this made her particularly vulnerable to being misinterpreted, especially given her disability-related support needs.
12. The Claimant worked alone on site, with no colleagues or members of the client’s team present, leaving her highly reliant on the Respondent’s support. When her senior manager went on maternity leave shortly before the incident, the Claimant lost her principal advocate. Those who assumed supervisory responsibility did not, she believed, understand the background or the nature of the hostility she had been facing. Her line manager supported her but went on unplanned sick leave for six weeks from 2 February 2024.
13. In the Claimant’s experience, the colleagues who took over supervision accepted the developer’s complaints at face value and gave insufficient weight to contrary evidence provided by her line manager. She believed this lack of contextual understanding significantly contributed to the decision to dismiss her.
14. The Claimant maintains that her dismissal was unfair and that a proper, balanced assessment of the facts, including her protected disclosures and the disability-related context, would, in her view, have led to a different outcome.